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1. The identity trade
   This book I expect will remain a university reference rather than alerting the public to privacy issues online. The public don’t want to read paragraphs from seventeen to twenty-nine lines long, which I met during the early pages. I would also have made the introduction more packed with salutary facts than discussion. For that reason I am dropping a star, but the author has clearly engaged in a great deal of reference and careful writing.
   The first section looks at the early rise of people giving and losing their hold on personal details on the early internet, on chatrooms (issues then raised during a murder trial for instance) or beginning the selfie craze. Options were suggested by the W3 so that users could set privacy preferences on their computer.
   The next section, firmly within the twenty-first century, points out that in 2009 the author met people working in online reputation management. Already the parents of the rich college age people were paying to have their online identities scrubbed of anything that might reduce their chances of college admission or hiring. (Some people today still haven’t caught on and plaster drinking photos all over Facebook and then wonder why they don’t get hired.) Search engines were also turning up issues that troubled potential political candidates, and scrubbing them would not be easy. ORM is now a well-funded industry.
   New terms use old words to help us understand them quickly. Like digital footprint, digital doppelganger, Google handshake, burying negative content under positive content. We also learn something of SEO and how Google reduces visibility of anyone trying to game the system with false external links. Shortly after that I found another 29 line paragraph and my eyes just glazed over, I’m afraid. Maybe a graph would have helped. I would have broken the paragraph halfway, between Laura Portwood-Stacer’s remarks and Patrick Ambron’s counter argument.
   The author goes on to refer to Safiya Umoja Noble’s work, which I’ve previously read, on the images and impressions given of African-American women online in search results. I recommend her book – ‘Algorithms of Oppression’, title not in the text.
   After that we are encouraged to build our own images on line, with again mixes of new and old terms; virtual store-front, digital hygiene. Another 29 line paragraph. A business handbook would have put the whole chapter into a bulleted list, three graphs and a cartoon. Different approaches for different folks.
   A main point the author makes is that creepy and unpleasant, maybe unethical, habits like scanning entire mails and headers and photos by corporate giants, even those items we just store, not share, is happening and is so ubiquitous now, that we think there is nothing to be done about it.
   Later she gets on to Big Data, by means of which the giants ‘monetise’ the actions of browsers, customers or not. Well, in this house, my husband Googled something for the first time and within the hour it was offered to him by Amazon. Proof that the giants sell data, if not necessarily to one another then to data brokers who warehouse the material and sell it on fast. Data brokers, another new – old term. However, I didn’t see supermarkets pushing pregnancy goods at women who didn’t know yet that they were expecting, mentioned here. A lot of the details which I have read in books such as ‘The Black Box Society’ by Frank Pasquale weren’t presented. The author does reference that book, so maybe she didn’t want to repeat it, but I think that concrete examples like Target and the expectant teen mother should have been used instead of mostly abstract discussion about the general concept. Examples prove the point and stick in the mind.
   As well as social theorists and reputation managers, I am pleased that the author spoke to computer professionals, such as an app developer. Self-tracking is one such bribe the firms offer. I appreciate the author’s point that even if firms were obliged to compensate people for their data, they would only be interested in compensating people likely to spend the most.
   Not included (that I saw): ad blockers, cookie cleaners and malware cleaners, all of which I use; VPNs and Tor; the certainty that people accessing free adult sites and pirate sites are downloading keyloggers at once. Whatever about ads containing malware on your webpage, you don’t want to let the bad guys put malware on your computer and steal your credit card details. Nor the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook was selling personal data to firms that were using bots to influence votes around the world for money; and while the book may have been prepared before that was exposed, it does put the concepts into proportion. As does the EU’s new GDPR. And China’s social media monitoring to rate citizens’ good standing for social privileges. That’s the trouble with writing about the infosector; it moves so fast.
   Notes P227 – 272 in my e-ARC. I counted 122 names which I could be sure were female. I saw no charts or illustrations but there may be some in the final text.
   The author is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. This book will chiefly be of interest to scholars, sociologists and those working up new theories about our computer age.
   I downloaded an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

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2. hard to get through though, it is dry
   The Identity Trade is true to its description, it explores how technology made it hard to control what is private and how privacy became a business. It was hard to get through though, it is dry. [Thanks to NetGalley and NYU press for the ARC]

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3. 3.5 rounded up to 4
   This book is so full of information, I had to read it in small increments. It read more like a textbook or reference piece to me. I was wishing it had been written more conversationally than lecture format. That being said, there is a wealth of well researched and documented information in The Identity Trade. I actually learned quite a bit and clarified some of the things mentioned recently in the media. I think it’s a book that belongs on any library reference shelf. It was well worth the read.
   I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

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